Soviet Baby Named for Samantha Smith

In 1982, 10-year-old American schoolgirl Samantha Smith wrote a letter to the head of the USSR, Yuri Andropov, asking him about the possibility of a nuclear war between the U.S. and the USSR.

Andropov wrote back. In his letter, he invited her to visit the USSR.

So, in July of 1983, Samantha and her parents spent two weeks visiting Russia. The trip was widely publicized in both countries.

Just two years later, Samantha was killed (along with her father) in a plane crash in her home state of Maine.

Several months after the crash, Moscow newspaper Trud reported that a baby girl born in Petrozavodsk, the capital of Karelia, had been named Samantha — “a name virtually unknown for Soviet girls” — in honor of Samantha Smith.